Global Weirding: the New Big Lie

They’re calling it Global Weirding now, as I suppose, inevitably they were bound to do in the end. Well “global warming” stopped working in 1989 when the globe stopped warming. “Climate change” was always a bit of a non-starter because climate does change regardless of whether or not we all drive 4 x 4s, or buy carbon offsets or listen to Stephen Fry and Ron Weasley’s injunction to take our holidays in England this year. And “Global Climate Disruption”, as some pillock tried to christen it, was never going to catch on because, well, it’s just too blatantly contrived and desperate isn’t it?

So Global Weirding it is. The concept was popularised last week in a characteristically dire and parti pris BBC Horizon documentary which purported to have lots of new evidence (or “hearsay” as it would more likely have been termed in a court of law) showing that our weather is getting more extreme – weirder. It seems to have been broadcast to coincide with a new IPCC report which has been excitedly written up in newspapers like the Guardian and the Detroit Free Press as evidence that we are heading towards climate disaster.

Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of scientists has said.

The greatest danger is in highly populated, poorer regions, but no corner of the globe is immune. The document, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts, and blames man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.

But this is pretty much the exact opposite of what the IPCC report actually says. As Roger Pielke Jr has noted, the report is a far cry from the IPCC’s usual slipshod, scaremongering standards:

Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where “right” means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.

A few quotable quotes from the report (from Chapter 4):

· “There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”

· “The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”

· “The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”

The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:

“Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.”

So what this IPCC report is saying is that WE DO NOT KNOW if there’s an anthropogenic signal in extreme weather patterns, and that there does not seem to be a trend towards increased extreme weather events such as tornados and tropical storms. Yet the liberal MSM is reporting the opposite. How come?

Well here’s the weird part. The misinformation comes from the IPCC’s summary of its own report (available here) which has been regurgitated, in classic churnalism style, by all the usual lazy MSM suspects. (H/T Katabasis)

It begins:

“Evidence suggests that climate change has led to changes in climate extremes such as heat waves, record high temperatures and, in many regions, heavy precipitation in the past half century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said today.”

The IPCC, of course, has form in this regard. With its four Assessment Reports, its Summaries for Policymakers have been notably more extreme and confident in CAGW than the reports themselves warrant. So yet again what we have here is the work of serious-minded, neutral scientists (yes, they do still exist) being twisted for political purposes by activists.

As we know, the great global warming alarmism Ponzi scheme is looking extremely vulnerable at the moment. Global warming has stopped. There’s a growing public backlash against eco-taxes, ugly flickery lightbulbs, higher energy bills, bat chomping eco-crucifixes and all the other paraphernalia of the environmental religion. And unfortunately, as we saw in ’44 and ’45, what these kind of people do when they get backed into a corner is not surrender but get nastier and more devious.

We’ve seen this recently in the Fakegate affair. And in Leo Hickman of the Guardian’s contemptible “expose” of one of the hitherto anonymous donors of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. And in the Planet Under Pressure comedy conference staged last week by comedy organisations including the Royal Society, mainly in order to try to breathe new life into the stagnant, green-tinged corpse of climate alarmism.

Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be “treated”, according to an Oregon-based professor of “sociology and environmental studies”. Professor Kari Norgaard (pictured) compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South.

Prof Norgaard holds a B.S. in biology and a master’s and PhD in sociology.

“Over the past ten years I have published and taught in the areas of environmental sociology, gender and environment, race and environment, climate change, sociology of culture, social movements and sociology of emotions,” she says.

The effort to re-brand legitimate scientific dissent as a mental disorder that requires pharmacological or psychological treatment is a frightening glimpse into the Brave New World society climate change alarmists see themselves as ruling over.

Due to the fact that skepticism towards man-made global warming is running at an all time high, and with good reason, rather than admit they have lost the debate, climate change alarmists are instead advocating that their ideological opponents simply be drugged or brainwashed into compliance.

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Henry Opukahai'a was an orphan raised by his uncle to be a pagan priest but he became disillusioned with rituals and chants. He fled Hawaii in 1807 with his friend Thomas Hopu on the American whaling ship Triumph bound for New England. They were befriended by Christian students at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, who instructed and prayed with them to be […]